Renowned, American born violinist & conductor, Yehudi Menuhin was a vegetarian and committed supporter of many social and environmental causes, with a great interest in Yoga and eastern religion. He was considered one of the greatest violinist of all time and this EMI recording of "Violin Voncertos by Vivaldi" is an excellent introduction to his work Performed by the Polish Chamber Orchestra.

Just 26 years old, Nicola Benedetti has been making chart-topping recordings for 10 years. This album celebrates the best of those recordings, and her other successes – from winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, to her 2012 best-selling album ‘The Silver Violin’, the highest charting classical instrumental album in the UK of the last two decades. A collection of great violin music – from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending to the Tchaikovsky and Bruch violin concertos and Arvo Part’s Spiegel Im Spiegel. Featuring brand new recordings – Brahms’ invigorating Hungarian Dance no. 5, Monti’s ever-popular Czardas, and Chopin’s emotional Nocturne in C# minor. The album includes Nicola performing with leading orchestras and conductors, as well as some of her favorite chamber players. This album showcases the incredible range of Nicola’s playing and demonstrates her wide appeal. In January 2013 Nicola was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to music and charity.

These three major British concertos span fully 70 years. Kenneth Leightons Concerto is a work of tensile urgency, scored with great imagination, and ending in an arch-like Epilogue of impassioned intensity. Written for soloist and string orchestra, the Concerto by Gordon Jacob contains at its heart a threnodic slow movement cast in long, moving paragraphs and accompanied by poetic effects.

Isabelle Faust's first recording for harmonia mundi, Bartok Sonatas, won her a Gramophone Young Artist of the Year. Here she returns to Bartok, perfoming the two concertos, accompanied by Daniel Harding and the Swedish Radio SO.

The unjustly neglected piano quartet (J76) was completed in September of the year 1809, which the 22-year-old Weber spent in Stuttgart. It was originally offered to the publisher Hans Georg Nägeli, but he rejected it, advising the composer that it created wanton ‘confusion in the arrangement of its ideas’ and indeed too obviously imitated the ‘bizarreries’ of Beethoven.

Friedrich Seitz was a noted violinist who served as concertmaster of the Bayreuth Festspiele, toured widely as a soloist and also composed a series of works, principally for violin and piano. He is best known for his Concertos for Violin and Piano, or Schüler-Konzerte (Student Concertos). Designed as an introduction to violin technique, they can be divided into two kinds: those wholly in the first (and easiest) position and those employing more advanced positions. Containing delightful melodies, short cadenzas, double-stops, trills, staccato bowing and much else, the concertos have proved enduringly popular vehicles for young performers since the day they were published.

Nigh on 60 years after his death, the Swiss composer, born in 1880 of Jewish origin, naturalized American in 1924, remains relatively little known by the general public and music lovers alike. Yet his music, full of lyricism, drama, virtuosity, poetry, has all it takes to please. His language combines tonality, bitonality, atonality, elements inherited from the Jewish musical tradition as well as allusions to movie style American music.

Nigh on 60 years after his death, the Swiss composer, born in 1880 of Jewish origin, naturalized American in 1924, remains relatively little known by the general public and music lovers alike. Yet his music, full of lyricism, drama, virtuosity, poetry, has all it takes to please. His language combines tonality, bitonality, atonality, elements inherited from the Jewish musical tradition as well as allusions to movie style American music.

Virtuoso Renaud Capuçon collaborates with Dennis Russell Davies and the esteemed Bruckner Orchester Linz in this new recording from Orange Mountain Music of violin concertos by two of the most popular composers of the 20th Century, Philip Glass and Leonard Bernstein.